See for example where the narrator lightly condemns Jack's cool promiscuity
(12:116); the novel remains ambivalent on the issue of how cruel and risky it is to assume you can
play lightly with other people's emotions (27:266)

Trollope's narrator begins Is He Popenjoy? by telling us its
story is "in nature akin" to that of a "poor Mrs Jones, who was happy enough down in Devonshire
till that wicked Lieutenant Smith came down and persecuted her:

You remember Mary Walker. Oh yes, you do — that pretty girl, but such a queer temper!
And how she was engaged to marry Harry Jones, and said she wouldn't at the church door, till her father threatened her with bread and water; and how they have been living ever after as happy as two turtle-doves down in Devonshire, till that scoundrel, Lieutenant Smith, went to Bideford! Smith has been found dead at the bottom of a saw-pit. Nobody's sorry for him. She's in a madhouse at Exeter; and Jones has disappeared, and couldn't have had more than thirty shillings in his pocket'.